Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) and automation control equipment used in the management of critical industrial systems such as electricity generation and distribution, oil production, transportation, manufacturing and health services has become increasingly interconnected through the use of popular communications technologies such as Ethernet, TCP/IP and web services. While the networking of SCADA and automation control equipment has brought considerable benefit in the form of improved information flows and efficiency, it has also exposed these systems to the possibility of attack from viruses, hackers and terrorists as once isolated devices and networks become accessible from around the world. Currently there numerous poorly protected control devices spanning the globe. These are charged with the safe operation of critical systems and infrastructure such as power transmission substations, gas pipelines, manufacturing plants and the like, yet at the same time remain largely unprotected from malicious persons who may target them for attack.
Traditional security solutions are based on central firewalls protecting unsecured internal devices or computers from the outside world, a design that cannot address the requirements of the industrial controls world. Existing controllers do not offer authentication, integrity or confidentiality mechanisms and can be completely controlled by any individual that can find or “ping” the network and the associated devices. In addition, they cannot be easily patched or have security features added to them. Once a virus or hacker manages to get past (or is already inside) the traditional firewall, the devices protected by the firewall, such as a typical programmable logic controller (PLC) or distributed control system (DCS) is an easy target for attack.
In many industrial environments, such as oil pipelines or electrical distribution systems, there can be hundreds of controller devices distributed across a wide geographic area, including very remote locations. Personnel with the skills to manage a traditional security device are often unavailable in these remote locations, so that devices that require even minor amounts of local configuration are unacceptable. For example, current firewall products that offer “transparent” operation still require the local configuration of network properties (such as IP address, gateway and network mask) or they are not remotely manageable, a serious shortcoming in the SCADA world. As well, since there are large number of separate locations in these distributed control systems (each requiring a firewall), there is a need for techniques for simultaneous management of hundreds of firewalls from a central location, ruling out the use of popular small office firewall solutions that are managed on a “one-by-one” basis.
Complicating the problem is that there are thousands of different makes and models of industrial control devices on the market, each communicating using one or more of the over 350 known SCADA communications protocols. Each control device needs very specific security rules to be protected correctly—for example, one popular PLC has an unusual but well-known security issue with web requests that contain URLs longer than 125 characters. Manually creating the separate rules in a traditional firewall for each protected devices' individual vulnerabilities causes the overall firewall configuration to be exceedingly complex and chance of introducing errors in the configuration is high.
Finally, the staff operating and maintaining these SCADA systems are, by necessity, highly trained control systems specialists and not information technology or security specialists. Thus the management of these security systems need to be based on a new paradigm that is understandable to the control technician, rather than the traditional network technology focused management and configuration of network systems. Without control technician and control product focused solutions, serious flaws are likely to occur in the setup and management of any security solution.
Accordingly, there is a need for a network security appliance for SCADA and automation control equipment that can be easily deployed and is remotely manageable and facilitates protection of network enabled control devices in widely distributed industrial environments.